YouTube’s gamification continues—with medals. But is anyone playing?
Announced last week on the YouTube Creators blog, the categories for medals thus far include All Time Most Popular, Recently Most Popular, and Trending, with gold, silver, and bronze attributions.
“These are the first wave of Medals we’re planning to announce” wrote Kurt Wilms, Product Manager in the official YouTube blog post. The purpose of the medals is to “recognize the great videos and creators out there.”
As expected, the videos in the “All Time Most Popular” are almost exclusively music videos by signed pop artists. “Charlie bit my finger – again!”, a home video, is the sole independent video in that category, boasting 388 million views.
The Trending Video medal, which is “given to the videos which gained huge attention over the last week and are currently seeing exceptional growth in viewership”—as stated by YouTube— isn’t any more helpful.
Videos awarded the Trending Medal this week already have a couple million views. The feature wouldn’t benefit regular YouTube users, as they’d already know about the content without going into the Medal’s dashboard.
So far, the YouTube community has been quiet on the new feature. Perhaps that’s because the award system mirrors an established feature, Honors, which automatically generates different distinctions based on stats.
The official blog post collected only a handful of comments, and on Twitter, a couple of users who did tweet about it compared it to Foursquare Badges. Michael Buckley, who does the popular “What The Buck” show appears to be one of the few YouTubers playing. Late yesterday when he tweeted his newest segment, he added “Lets get this a crap ton of medals.”
Photo by reconstructionist